Do you need a bike computer or GPS for a long ride?
Answer
No. In May I rode the 235 kilometre Fietselfstedentocht, my hottest edition ever, on a fixed gear with no bike computer, no GPS and no heart rate on my wrist: a mechanical watch, a stamp card and a sensor quietly recording in the background. Two weeks earlier a ride from Amsterdam home became my fastest crossing ever, six hours and nineteen minutes, without a screen telling me so. More data would have helped the post-analysis, not the performance; the stamp card gave the segment speeds anyway. Breathing turned out to be the most important indicator of what is sustainable, and I passed trains of riders fixated on their screens at four to five kilometres an hour faster.